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  <div class="section" id="pcm-terminology-and-concepts">
<h1>PCM Terminology and Concepts<a class="headerlink" href="#pcm-terminology-and-concepts" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
<p>In order to use PCM devices it is useful to be familiar with some concepts and
terminology.</p>
<dl class="docutils">
<dt>Sample</dt>
<dd><p class="first">PCM audio, whether it is input or output, consists of <em>samples</em>.
A single sample represents the amplitude of one channel of sound
at a certain point in time. A lot of individual samples are
necessary to represent actual sound; for CD audio, 44100 samples
are taken every second.</p>
<p>Samples can be of many different sizes, ranging from 8 bit to 64
bit precision. The specific format of each sample can also vary -
they can be big endian byte integers, little endian byte integers, or
floating point numbers.</p>
<p class="last">Musically, the sample size determines the dynamic range. The
dynamic range is the difference between the quietest and the
loudest signal that can be resproduced.</p>
</dd>
<dt>Frame</dt>
<dd>A frame consists of exactly one sample per channel. If there is only one
channel (Mono sound) a frame is simply a single sample. If the sound is
stereo, each frame consists of two samples, etc.</dd>
<dt>Frame size</dt>
<dd><dl class="first last docutils">
<dt>This is the size in bytes of each frame. This can vary a lot: if each sample</dt>
<dd><dl class="first last docutils">
<dt>is 8 bits, and we&#8217;re handling mono sound, the frame size is one byte.</dt>
<dd>Similarly in 6 channel audio with 64 bit floating point samples, the frame
size is 48 bytes</dd>
</dl>
</dd>
</dl>
</dd>
<dt>Rate</dt>
<dd>PCM sound consists of a flow of sound frames. The sound rate controls how
often the current frame is replaced. For example, a rate of 8000 Hz
means that a new frame is played or captured 8000 times per second.</dd>
<dt>Data rate</dt>
<dd><p class="first">This is the number of bytes, which must be recorded or provided per
second at a certain frame size and rate.</p>
<p>8000 Hz mono sound with 8 bit (1 byte) samples has a data rate of
8000  * 1 * 1 = 8 kb/s or 64kbit/s. This is typically used for telephony.</p>
<p class="last">At the other end of the scale, 96000 Hz, 6 channel sound with 64
bit (8 bytes) samples has a data rate of 96000 * 6 * 8 = 4608
kb/s (almost 5 Mb sound data per second)</p>
</dd>
<dt>Period</dt>
<dd>When the hardware processes data this is done in chunks of frames. The time
interval between each processing (A/D or D/A conversion) is known
as the period.
The size of the period has direct implication on the latency of the
sound input or output. For low-latency the period size should be
very small, while low CPU resource usage would usually demand
larger period sizes. With ALSA, the CPU utilization is not impacted
much by the period size, since the kernel layer buffers multiple
periods internally, so each period generates an interrupt and a
memory copy, but userspace can be slower and read or write multiple
periods at the same time.</dd>
<dt>Period size</dt>
<dd>This is the size of each period in Hz. <em>Not bytes, but Hz!.</em> In
<a class="reference internal" href="libalsaaudio.html#module-alsaaudio" title="(Linux) "><tt class="xref py py-mod docutils literal"><span class="pre">alsaaudio</span></tt></a> the period size is set directly, and it is
therefore important to understand the significance of this
number. If the period size is configured to for example 32,
each write should contain exactly 32 frames of sound data, and each
read will return either 32 frames of data or nothing at all.</dd>
</dl>
<p>Once you understand these concepts, you will be ready to use the PCM API. Read
on.</p>
</div>


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